Shack: You can play the campaign co-op, but is there any competitive multiplayer?

Mikey Neumann: Oh yes. Within just the regular co-op mode, you can walk up to any of your friends at any time, let's say I'm playing with you, I walk up and I literally bitch slap you. And then it tells you that, "yo, that guy just bitch slapped you, what you wanna do about that?"

So you bitch slap me back, a dome comes down, and we go into a dueling mode. You use all your skills and all your abilities, and that's just the most basic thing.

Within the world, there's actually a lot of instances, you can walk into these things we call arenas. The arenas are actually fully hardcore, Quake style level design all about fighting your friends. It's part of the universe, not a separate mode.

Shack: Do you actually have to walk into an arena, or can you quick-jump from the menu?

Mikey Neumann: You can fast travel to anywhere in the game. The fast travel off of the menu is actually from the save stations, those are all over the place. You can travel pretty easily.

Shack: Okay. One of my major pet peeves with open-world games is when you have to manually walk or drive across the map, to a place you've already been, instead of just warping, and it's not really justified.

For example, Burnout Paradise. It's a wonderful game, but if I'm going to a specific event or race and I've been to that intersection before, why not let me choose it from a menu? I get the immersion angle, I can respect it, but sometimes I just want to play.

Mikey Neumann: I'm not mentioning names, but there's this weird--we [as game developers] almost make immersion a necessity, like "yeah, we're gonna immerse you in the world" and...really?

Again, games are supposed to be fun. [Gamers] don't want to be punished all the time to get to the fun stuff. I understand, there's always going to be a down [time], you can't throw explosions and all that stuff in the game all the time.

It's kinda interesting to find that balance where you want to make sure the player's always having fun, or at least understands what he or she's supposed to do, and we're letting them take shortcuts when he or she needs.

Shack: With Xbox Live and PlayStation Network, I can get an idea as to how the multiplayer setup will work on consoles. But what about PC? Is Gearbox doing its own thing there? Games for Windows Live?

Mikey Neumann: We are doing our own thing. It's gonna be lobby-based, we're trying to keep it as close to Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 [offerings] as possible. We want to make sure that everyone can play our game and have fun, it's gonna be a slightly simpler lobby, we still have all the options you have on the other ones. Maybe more, PC people like their options. We're gonna try to keep it as close as possible.

Shack: Any plans for a demo?

Mikey Neumann: We talk about a demo every day. We would love to do a demo. There's obviously factors there. If and when we do one, I don't know if it'd be pre-launch or post-launch, because ...there's a lot of factors there.

We would love to promise a demo, we can't quite yet, we just want to get the game done. That's always the hardest thing for developers to do--you never quite know how the time's going to work out. We're doing really well, but I can't promise it.

Shack: I imagine it'd be tough to do a post-release demo, when those people could be working on Aliens or the other two projects at Gearbox.

Mikey Neumann: Anybody that wants to make this game sell more [would do it], which is everyone at Gearbox. We want people to enjoy our game. I don't think--nice segue into the other stuff going on at Gearbox--I don't anticipate we're just gonna have everybody not work on Borderlands [after release].

We have downloadable content to think about, we have the future of Borderlands to think about. I can't talk about DLC obviously right now because we haven't released the game yet, so that would be stupid to talk about what we're thinking about. We have a lot of really really cool stuff we want to add to the game, to make the universe that much better.

Shack: Is that stuff that was cut out of the game?

Mikey Neumann: Absolutely not. This is stuff we're coming up with like, right now. It's not like we're cutting it right now, we're coming up all these ways of--again, we had this really recent epiphany, this is like the last year, this epiphany about "hey, let's make this awesome and just a crazy, crazy sort of game." The ideas come out of that.

The stuff we actually cut out of the game was really small. If anything, we're adding stuff. Like, the last time we talked, it was 500,000 guns. Now, it's millions. We're adding as much as we can. We're gonna add new stuff, throw it out there, and be thinking about how to make Borderlands a better and better franchise.

Keep reading to learn why that DLC can't be in the retail release..